Speaker:Scott McCalla, Montana State University
Title: Modeling crime and gangs

Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss two research projects on modeling criminal behavior. The first part of the talk will concentrate on the effects of personal relationships and shared ideologies on levels of crime and the formation of criminal coalitions in the context of an adversarial, evolutionary game. These relationships are treated as a social network on a graph of N players, or a “sacred values network". These are groups of individuals that are subject to special consideration or treatment by that player. We explore the effects on the dynamics of the system that these networks induce, through various forms of protection from both victimization and punishment. The second part will concentrate on understanding seasonal variations in crime rates. Many law enforcement personal believe simple statements like "when the temperature heats up, so does my job". We examine this ideology by extracting seasonal variations in crime rates from noisy data in the Los Angeles and Houston metropolitan areas, and then modeling this data with a stochastic differential equation.

Time: Friday, April 8, 2016, 1:30-2:20 p.m.

Place: Exploratory Hall, Room 4106

Department of Mathematical Sciences
George Mason University
4400 University Drive, MS 3F2
Fairfax, VA 22030-4444
http://math.gmu.edu/
Tel. 703-993-1460, Fax. 703-993-1491